Just a little post mortem... the above Repair process trashed the bluetooth setup, and a day later I still cannot get a BT connection to a mobile phone working as a dial-up modem. I might reinstall the original Thinkpad BT drivers. Really weird, and what a waste of time.
One has to be careful because having got to this stage, every time you expose the computer to M$ updates, SP3 will be presented prominently at the top of the list, every time for ever, and it would be easy for someone less than well informed to just download and install it.